I’ve had enough. I keep seeing businesses and organizations auto-posting the same messages on different social networks. You can get away with it sometimes if the message is generic enough. But you can also make your company look lazy and dumb. And you can easily annoy potential (or existing) customers.

Lazy, dumb and annoying … is that what you call social media marketing?

The most common scenario that I see is businesses and organizations cross-posting to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Here are three reasons why that’s an accident waiting to happen, complete with several examples as evidence.

It Makes You Look Lazy

Look, we know you’re busy. Running a small business is tough. It’s time-consuming. You need all the help you can get. So if you can save a little time by sending one message to Facebook and having it cross-posted to Twitter … wow, so convenient, right?

Except when you forget that you’re auto-posting to both places and write your messages just for one audience.

Three tweets … each one directed to people on Facebook. Does that make any sense? No. It looks lazy.

It Makes You Look Dumb

You also look dumb, because sometimes you include calls to action in your Facebook status updates — “like this” and “timeline that” — and, of course, your followers on Twitter are seeing that and thinking, Are these people dumb? There’s no “like” button on Twitter!

It’s Annoying

Twitter can accept photos, too, and they show up right in the timeline. It’s really convenient. But in the case above, I can’t see your photo unless I feel like clicking through to Facebook. Guess what? I don’t. It’s annoying.

And believe me, there are a lot more than just the three of us who feel this way — including a lot of your customers and potential customers.

Turn off the automatic cross-posting to multiple social networks. You have different audiences on each one. And if you don’t have time to dedicate to multiple social networks, then just put up a message on your unused profiles indicating which social network you’re most active on. That’s a lot better than looking dumb and lazy while annoying people on social networks that you don’t really have time for.